Updating Apple Watch without WiFi?

I have an unlimited 5G plan with 400 Mbit/s on my phone and have to use an external source to update my watch?

8 comments

I don’t remember if this worked but: disable Bluetooth, turn on hotspot on the phone and connect the watch to the hotspot, update from the watch.
- I’ll definitely try that
- This hasn’t been a thing for ages.
Can you not use a hotspot?
- Like a hotspot with my phone and connecting the watch to it?
  
  Yes
If you want to update using cellular only, you need to start the process from your phone. Your watch does not support 400 MB/s transfer rates over cellular. It’s a watch, not an iPhone 15 Pro with hardware ray tracing.

If you want to update the watch OTA, it has to be connected to wifi. Cellular is not fast or reliable enough, ergo why Apple set wifi as the base.
There's a whole bunch of stuff, not just on the watch and not just updates, that only happen if there's a wifi connection while your devices are charging overnight.

8 comments